Culture crash

How both coffee and tea came to represent me Sadaf Ahsan

There’s a Balti saying in Pakistan that goes, “The first time you share tea with a Balti, you are a stranger. The second time you take tea, you are an honoured guest. The third time you share a cup of tea, you become family.”

But what about when you share a cup of coffee? It was a question that wasn’t allowed in my Pakistani family, packed with tea enthusiasts, but one that I often wondered about. To my parents, drinking coffee was as depraved as smoking a cigarette – it was “a Western thing.”

And so I, too, became a tea enthusiast. It practically coursed through my veins. But not forever. I was 22 when I left tea for coffee. I had flirted with it through my teens, but didn’t officially commit until my senior year at university the night before three final exams. It was a necessary drug, I told myself, I needed this. Until this juncture in my life, I had spent over two decades scoffing at snobbish coffee drinkers, clutching my mug of tea as if it were my torch and I was Liberty. I was a tea loyalist, not because I had decided to be, but because it was in my blood. In South Asian cultures, tea is not a privilege but a right, on par with water and air. ( In fact, tea leaves are found on the Pakistani state emblem.)

I was raised on it by my parents, who consumed it at least three times a day with a generous helping of milk and sugar (“doodh pati cha”). Had a bad day? Got a new job? Sick? Someone start boiling the water! When I first moved away, my mom’s first gift to me was a luxe tea kettle, and she has a tea cup set she’s waiting to give me on my wedding day. And while your dad might have secretly slipped you your first sip of beer when you were 13, but mine slipped me my first shot of cha.

In a state of desperation, there is no space for tradition, however. With exams looming, it was time to get real. I bought two large black coffees, drinking the first so quickly it burned my tongue. Within minutes, I felt an immediate burst of energy course through my body. My eyes lost their droop, my arms tingled and just like that, second coffee in hand, I began to race through my notes, ingesting the material in front of me at the same pace as I had inhaled the coffee.

The next morning, I was more alert than I had ever been in my life. It was as if I had woken up a completely different person. In fact, I could barely recall the details of the previous night. The coffees were like steroids for my brain. I raced through my exams with an unparalleled focus.

From that day on, coffee slowly began to infiltrate my daily routine, to the point that I now drink it three times a day and am dysfunctional without it. Tea takes effort; coffee is easy. That was a realization that felt like a rite of passage, but it also meant betraying my family, for whom my new preference was no small occurrence.

My dad scoffed, “You’re too Canadian now.” Me cutting back my tea intake had become a metaphor for my assimilation. In this small but significant instance, I’d found a way to straddle the East and the West, borrowing the best from each side as coffee evolved into a daily necessity and tea into an evening pleasure. It isn’t so much that one is better than the other; coffee is a much-needed slap in the face, while tea is a warm hug on a cold day.